This series is reviewing Rethinking The Wineskin
One of the biggest struggles I’ve had in the past couple of years is this – what is the purpose of the church? Trying to answer this question while ignoring the effects of your background is nearly impossible. Having grown up in a traditional church, with an emphasis on both evangelism and holiness, it’s hard to think of anything other than “reaching the lost.”
Properly conceived, the church exists to make the fullness of Christ known on the earth. It stands here to register Christ’s final victory over Satan in every place (Eph. 3:9-10). As His Body, the church is here to express Jesus in all of His glory.
Notice that there’s nothing in there about saving individual people. We are called to “build the church,” but the pressing question is simply what is the purpose of what is being built?
Our American/evangelical variant of Christianity has turned this around. We are taught that the purpose of the church is to add people to the church. That doesn’t really make any sense – by having kids, I create a family. But what is the purpose of my family? Is the purpose of my family to have kids? The logic becomes circular, and can easily become a justification for having lots of kids without being at all concerned with who those kids grow up to be. This is what has happened to the church – we’ve become so focused on adding people to the church that we lose sight of what the church is supposed to become and what it is supposed to represent.
So to make this perfectly clear, adding people to the church is not the purpose of the church.
I’m also not really going to address the “change the world” ideal that many view as the purpose of the church, because in reality you just can’t find that in the Bible.
There are three primary metaphors for understanding the purpose of the church, and centered on the idea of a singular, connected, unified church body:
The Temple
Under the old covenant, the temple was the physical place where God would dwell on earth. It contained His presence, and as such, strict instructions were given as to how it would be created, assembled, and maintained. Each aspect of temple life was governed by law.
Under the new covenant, God dwells within His people, the church. We contain God’s presence. And we have rather specific instructions as to how we are created (through salvation), how we are assembled (through love and mutual edification), and how we are to be maintained (through holiness).
One brick never made a temple yet, nor has a heap of bricks piled on top of the other. The church is a people built together into one new man. And it exists to be the corporate expression of Christ.
The Bride
Paul describes as a mystery newly revealed that God has been preparing a bride for Christ. Revelation gives a glorious picture of the beauty of Christ’s bride (described as a shining city). As is the purpose of any bride, the purpose of the church is to prepare ourselves for Christ.
The two central themes of the church as the bride are purity and love. These are not individualistic, though, they are collective – it is not or individual purity that really matters in this regard, it is our collective purity as a church. Purity in holiness and obedience. But our purity must be motivated out of our love for Christ.
The Lampstand
In an often overlooked part of Revelation, the church is described as a lampstand of pure gold. (Revelation 1:20) The purpose of this lampstand is to shine out Christ, to “bear the testimony of Jesus.” The only way this can be done is for the lampstand to be made into the image of Christ through discipleship.
There is also much to be said of the church as the kingdom of God – in essence, the church is the visible agent of the kingdom on earth, similar to the metaphor of the lampstand. But as the kingdom of God, we are also called to be the hands of Christ in the world – preaching the good news, bringing healing, deliverance, and freedom.
When we talk about the purpose of the church being to bring salvation to the lost, or to be an agent of change in the world, though, we are missing the critical, higher purpose. When the church is properly being the church, it will bring salvation to the lost, it will call out evil in the world and serve as a counter-example of love and purity. But these are not the church’s purpose.
The church is the very fiancé of Jesus Christ. It is the new humanity. It is the lifestyle of the coming kingdom. It is the Christian’s natural habitat. It is the spiritual environment where face-to-face encounters between the Bridegroom and His Bride take place. It is the living witness to the fullness of God’s Son.
In short, whenever the church gathers together, its guiding and functioning principle is simply – to be Christ (1 Cor. 12:12).